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Comment by chockchocschoir | Hacker News Reader

Don't you define things in your repository first (usually via a `Makefile`) and then call those things in the CI environment? Or are you building things differently in the CI environment compared to the local environment?

I mean, if you're working on a project that has tests, code coverage and binary builds setup, you usually have a `Makefile` or `package.json` or whatever to run your scripts, and your CI setup just calls those very same scripts but in their environment (sometimes with different arguments/environment variables).

Not sure why it would be different for GitHub Actions. It's certainly how I use it day-to-day.

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In my case, at least, GH actions is the only place with all the secrets necessary to deploy my (small) webapp. Sure, I can generate alternative tokens and pull some things out of 1password, but it'd be time consuming. (Also, changing things like JWT secrets is less than ideal.)

There's also just the number of things it checks. jest runs, lint/build, e2e and acceptance tests, 2 docker builds pushed into ghcr, and then ansible to deploy. It's mildly error-prone to do myself, especially the docker and ansible steps because that's where the secrets come in.

So sure, it CAN be done manually, but the entire point of CI/CD is to do everything consistently, repeatedly, and without the risk of manual error. It took me hours to figure things out the first time. Why would I want to risk doing things manually now?

no that's not how it works at all. The "actions" are proprietary to GitHub and hosted on GitHub. People create custom actions and allow others to reuse them. Everything is hooked in to GitHub via their proprietary yaml config.

> Not sure why it would be different for GitHub Actions.

because vendor lock-in. GitHub doesn't want to make it easy for you to switch.

If you have vendor lockin with GitHub Actions, it's because you chose to do it to yourself. Nothing prevents you from using only the `run` action to run a shell script so that everything that CI does can also be done on your dev machine.

Both my personal projects and my $dayjob repositories have every test, etc triggered via `make test` or `test.sh`, then the GitHub Actions workflow YAML just `run`s it. Secrets also work fine - the makefile / shell script expects them to be defined as env vars, so the developer running them locally just needs to define those env vars regardless of how they obtained the secrets.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25104253

thanks for the downvotes.

> it's because you chose to do it to yourself.

I didn't choose shit. My company did. Why are you putting this on me?

> Both my personal projects and my $dayjob repositories have every test

Congrats on not actually using GitHub actions? I guess?

So many people here sucking Microsoft cock. And there is yet another incident today! What's that make, three days in a row now? Four, if we're actually counting. They aren't even hitting 2 nines uptime. Two. Fucking. Nines. Going on many years now. But apparently that is just fine because everyone is running self-hosted infra in parallel to their cloud shit.

>Congrats on not actually using GitHub actions? I guess?

>But apparently that is just fine because everyone is running self-hosted infra in parallel to their cloud shit.

In your haste to complain about downvotes and accuse other people of "sucking Microsoft cock", you forgot to actually read the comment you replied to.

Things in the comment you replied to:

1. An assertion that one can write their CI in a script that is not tied to one CI vendor, so that it's easy to run the same steps as what the CI does locally or in another CI. ie, no lock-in to the current CI.

Things not in the comment you replied to:

1. An assertion that I run self-hosted CI in addition to GitHub Actions.

2. An assertion that GitHub has good uptime.

Sure, but then I guess you always install the dependencies from scratch, can't utilize cache, and won't have a dependency graph as well.

Parallelising your build/deployment will likely also be harder to do.

>Sure, but then I guess you always install the dependencies from scratch

Sure? On your dev machines the dependencies are already installed. On GHA VMs the network is fast enough that installing deps is not slow. What's the problem?

And if you really have a problem, presumably you have some master tarball / container image that your devs use to set up their dev machines because installing your deps is so complicated, so scp / pull that in your script?

>can't utilize cache

A cache is necessary for CI VMs that are cleaned for every run. When building locally your dev machine already has everything the cache would have.

>and won't have a dependency graph as well. > >Parallelising your build/deployment will likely also be harder to do.

You realize the two things shell scripts are good at is running commands either series or parallel, exactly how you want them? Instead of learning a brand new DSL to be able to do `if` and `&`, you just write `if` and `&`. This is already covered in the comment I linked.

You make some good points and I tend to agree with your approach. What you have to do though is skip using "uses: actions/", "needs", and won't be able to use other actions that has been published to the Github marketplace. So you have to make a conscious decision to go against the way people usually uses Github actions and won't be able to utilize some of their features. You avoid vendor lock-in though, which is what we are talking about :)

Right, that's the idea. Not only are these "actions" the cause of lock-ins, you also have to treat them as dependencies that you're trusting with your repo integrity, secrets, etc. As soon as you start using third-party actions you have to start worrying about https://docs.github.com/en/actions/security-guides/security-...

SourceHut is one source code hosting with the right idea here. Its CI only has the equivalent of the `run` command for running shell scripts - https://man.sr.ht/builds.sr.ht/manifest.md#tasks

Yes. I have debated with myself before which route I should take. I went with the Github way, just because I felt uncomfortable making a decision like this that goes against all the examples. Perhaps it was the wrong approach. Another problem with the Github way, is that functions/code-reuseability is almost non-existent.

Are there any CI/CD metasystems that aren't vendor locked-in? GitHub/even GitLab, Jenkins (freestyle and scripted)/Azure/Travis.... all vendor-specific, as far as I know.

Sure, have all the heavyweight stuff in separate scripts that are just called, but platform specification/multiple platform builds/specifics of caching/secret handling/deployment handling are always different. Some tools (e.g. codecov) do abstract over some platforms, but not all, and the GitHub Actions model of "here is a literally pre-prepared step in your pipeline" can be pretty appealing.

It's literally, pick your poison, and resign yourself to reimplementation if you ever need to switch platforms.

You can run github actions offline

https://github.com/nektos/act

I don't think github is trying to create lock-in, I think rather they were trying to make a way to easily share actions (not sure what other CIs systems are designed to have an ecosystem of publicly shared actions). The actions are public and therefore easy to make something that interprets them.

I can only guess at some point there will be a push for CIs to converge on some "actions" standard, maybe?

That's neat, though it is a 3rd party trying to replicate it.

Gitlab's open source runner supports parsing the ci yml and running a job locally, presumably using the same code as the platform, like:

  gitlab-runner exec docker some-job-name

Though they would both suffer on any dependencies on platform hosted environment vars, secrets managers, etc.

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